The startup is focusing on North America out of the gate, and while they will initially sell direct until they build up some traction, they see their solution as idea for cloud-focused system integrators.
Satori Cyber founders Yoav Cohen (L) and Eldad Chai (R)
Today, Israeli startup Satori Cyber is coming out of stealth, with the announcement that they have received $5.25 million in initial seed funding. led by YL Ventures, a venture firm focuses on early seed-stage investing in Israeli cybersecurity startups. Satori Cyber makes a solution that provides continuous visibility and granular control for data flows across all cloud and hybrid data stores. to allow discovery and classification of data in real time. That enables holistic management of multiple types of cloud data stores, which are typically governed by separate policies.
“We have three design principles that make us different from other offerings in the market,” said Eldad Chai, Satori Cyber’s CEO. “The first is being transparent. This is because the companies that we talk to have already invested a lot, and we cannot ask them to change the way that they work with their data. The second principle is being continuous, protecting the data over time because data is a moving target. The third is to be able to provide a solution that talks at a business level. For example, we have a U.S. prospect that sells to Europe, so are subject to the EU’s GDPR privacy regulations. They need to make sure that non-European companies don’t access their European data. Being able to close that gap between business level requirements and technical requirements is difficult, but is essential.”
Chai, and his co-founder Yoav Cohen both came out of Incapsula, a cloud-based application delivery platform that provides Web application security and DDoS mitigation which was both spun out of, and eventually reacquired by, Imperva.
“Incapsula and Imperva are in a more traditional space in terms of how they approach the issues,” Chai said. “We founded Satori Cyber in mid-2019 to take a new approach after Imperva was acquired by Thoma Bravo.”
Yoav Cohen, Satori Cyber’s CTO, explained what specifically is different about the company’s data protection and governance platform.
“We looked carefully at existing solutions and decided that the first thing we needed to address was to provide a holistic solution, and not just data governance,” he said. “We saw that companies were having to piece together existing solutions, which created both operational overhead and a lowest common denominator outcome. We determined that the best solution was a service that sits between applications and BI tools and the data stores, which observes and maps the traffic to and from the data stores. After we have that mapping done, we can then apply business-level policies on the data flows. Our approach and architecture ensures that we future-proof for any type of data store.”
While Satori Cyber’s functionality overlaps with data management, data discovery and data store solutions, Chai emphasized that it is designed to work with the solutions that customers will already have in place.
“We are not a replacement strategy,” Chai said. “We are additive, and designed to integrate within an existing environment. We help existing investments work better, especially with large data lakes and data warehouses in the cloud.”
As Satori Cyber develops its proof-of-concept stage strategy, their target for initial reference customers are those whose business is highly data-driven.
“We are looking at customers who really see data as a strategic asset,” Chai indicated. Typically, these will be medium to large enterprises with large amounts of regulated data and a high and growing demand for internal access.
The Go-to-Market strategy in this proof-of-concept stage will be direct, but the company thinks that this will be an ideal channel play, particularly for cloud-focused system integrators.
“While we will sell direct in the early stage, further down the road, after we gain some market traction, we see cloud-focused system integrators as great partners for this kind of solution, because of the level of visibility that we provide,” Chai said. “The visibility we provide will be an important factor in SIs’ ability to operate a cloud environment. These SIs are looking for SaaS platforms that fit both cloud and hybrid environments, because many of their customers are both in the cloud and on-prem.
“It is too early though to approach this kind of partner,” Chai indicated.
While the company’s head office is in Israel, the initial sales focus is on North America.
“We are just focused on Norh America for now,” Chai said. “The funding from this seed round will be to build out that North American sales and marketing team.”
That will include an office in the U.S., but the location has not yet been decided, he added.
